Letter to Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose – Suggestions for Digg

Jay/Kevin, I have two suggestions for your Digg service to which I am quite confident will address the issues here and here that I raised last week. Both topics I posted seem to have at least 50% of the commenters agreeing with me which led me to start thinking about how to help improve your service. Without any further ado, here are my two major suggestions for improvement. These suggestions come from reading hundreds of posts and comments about the subjects I wrote about.

1. Offer a feed for comments on a post

Since the notion of removing comments all together on Digg seems to be out of the question, what about offering a feed for comments. Then I, as site owner, can choose whether to include Digg comments on my site which would address my concern about the content creator having all comments appear on his or her article.

Perhaps the content creator could decide whether comments could appear on other sites outside of their own and Digg. They may want to limit the feed to those two.

2. Allow me to show my site inside Digg after it leaves the home page

In my first concern post last week, I asked whether Digg should be indexed by Google. I still am not convinced that it should be. So to combat the issue of a user not making it to the actual content site, I propose that Digg offer content creators an option to offer the site content page that is on Digg perhaps inside a frame. If this was an option, I would be more comfortable with Google returning Digg results.

So how would this work? Once a site leaves the home page or if a story is buried, the Digg page would show the site (live) inside a frame within the Digg page. Now the user sees the diggs, the digg comments, the actual content and any associated comments. This provides an awesome holistic view of the content. And everyone is happy.

Conclusion

So there are my suggestions. Simple suggestions which will increase your value to the community. If you would like to discuss them in more detail, feel free to contact me. I would certainly be happy to help you improve your service for both your community and for the content owners who keep your service moving.